9 “Whole” Weeks of Free Choice Reading

What would happen if we let students choose everything they read in our-their English class? In the past, I would begin every school year with a shared text. My thinking was that if we could have a shared experience, we could come back to the characters, conflict, craft, and theme again and again. My thinking was that I could teach how I wanted students to read and teach what I wanted students to do with the text from the beginning. I thought that I could set the tone and gradually give them more freedom, more choice in their reading.

Last year, I wrote about how I implemented reading workshop in my junior high reading classes, and students did choose many of their books, but still, I began the year with a book I chose, which took priority over their own choices.

And then this summer (2016), I attended a session with Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle at the International Literacy Association Conference in Boston. Gallagher and Kittle talked about how they were developing a map of their reading year that began with free choice/independent reading– 10 whole weeks. I thought: How would that change things for my teaching, for students if I did the same? I imagined what I could learn about students and who they were as readers. I imagined how I’d have to change my approach and thinking. What question or idea could guide and unite us for a nine-week unit of reading (the length of our first quarter)? How would the assessments have to change if students were free to choose the topics, genres, and even difficulty of their texts? Gosh, what would nearly 175 students”want” to read and how would I get those books into their hands?

An Overview of the Nine Weeks

First, I have to admit that in a nine-week quarter, there aren’t exactly nine weeks available for reading. The first two weeks were orientation activities and testing. The last two weeks of the quarter included portfolio assembly, presentations, and grade conferences, so that essentially left five-ish weeks of choice reading, which makes the amount and quality of reading that happened across my six classes (four eighth grade and two seventh grade) rather amazing.

Our classes are forty-one minutes. Reading — actual reading — had to be a priority every day. When, then, would I “teach”?  What would or should I teach?

I decided the best way to approach the quarter would be with the question of where stories come from, how authors craft stories for readers, and why we read and listen to stories. Framing our independent reading this way, meant that my job was to ask these questions every day and to set up experiences for students to explore these questions. Standards related to author’s craft, words in context, public speaking, and reading diverse, complex texts informed my instruction as I developed essentially five parts to our class, which I will explain below (independent reading, close reading, text structure, language lessons, and read alouds). Essentially, however, I organized our daily time this way:

• Monday through Thursday: 7 minutes of language study,34 minutes of reading and conferring individually and in small groups; during the 34 minutes, I would either take a small group to a table to do a mini-lesson or I would meet with students individually to book talk  options and confer about what they were noticing about their books.
• Fridays: read alouds. These days, students would read short pieces while their classmates/ audience would listen for and document textual evidence of sensory language, figurative language, tone, mood, word choice, character interaction, etc.
• Daily Portfolio Development: Every day, students were responsible for documenting their reading experiences. They’d take pictures of books and sticky notes; they’d document reading responses on Google forms. We used these artifacts for an end-of-quarter portfolio to demonstrate learning and negotiate final grades.

Independent Reading

I proposed the goal for students to read books that demonstrate they are stretching into a variety of genres and topics. How they interpreted variety and how they chose their books became central to our daily reading conferences. I have a great classroom library supported by the Bokor foundation and spent all last summer reading a book a day so that I could give personalized book talks. Students tracked their progress on a Google form. Here are a four students’ independent reading portfolios:

• Maddie:Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, The Crossover, Ghosts, Drum Dream Girl, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Jarely: Orbiting Jupiter, Jars of Hope, The Smell of Old Lady Perfume, Nasreen’s Secret School, Ms.Marvel
• Tomas: The One and Only Ivan, Death Coming Up the Hill, Buddha Boy, Boy 21, The Fifth Wave, All American Boys, Trash

• Diego: Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, My Friend Dahmer, Joey Pigza Loses Control

Close Reading of Authors’ Craft

As soon as we finished the two weeks of orientation and testing,we spent a few days reflecting on stories from our lives that have stayed with us. We partnered and shared these stories with each other and then carefully considered how best to represent those stories in biographical narratives. We studied how authors lead readers into a scene, reveal characters, move the plot, make dialogue come alive, access our senses, and move readers to reflect on the meaning of a memory. We talked about how authors need to illustrate and imagine for readers, and that comes with an ethical responsibility.

During independent reading, I met with small groups to talk through their craft as authors writing their classmates’ stories and then asked them to make connections to their independent reading. Instead of whole class mini-lessons, I used the small group time to confer with students about their responsibility as authors to represent the story of their classmate; we talked about how their decisions impacted the story and the reader. Below is one student’s representation of her classmate’s memory, which she shared in our Friday read-aloud day. This experience of authoring helped students to then read more closely to “notice and note” (Beers and Probst) author’s craft in sticky notes so that we could later discuss just how authors represent humanity to move readers to witness humanity.

Text Structure

Students were choosing to read verse novels, graphic novels and biographies, picture books, plays, and chapter books in a variety of genres. We looked closely at how narratives look in different genres and compared our biographical sketches to drama in text structure to highlight an author’s choice in genre. Our work with biographical sketches created a foundation for talking about narratives, and then we compared those texts with the dramas we read for our read aloud Fridays (see below). I guess I wanted to emphasize that stories are representations of the human experience — deliberately crafted by people for people.

Language

Twice a week, we began class with a language lesson where students considered a word’s impact on the meaning of the sentence. We chose words for these lessons that helped us to talk about ourselves, people we knew, and the characters we were meeting in our independent reading, e.g., tenacious, audacious, and melancholy. We, then, encouraged students to noticed unfamiliar or effective word choice in their reading. Again, I connected this work to students’ reading in our conferences.

Read Alouds

Fridays and the final week of the quarter, we had story time. Students read the biographical sketches they wrote so that we could bear witness to teach other’s lives. Then, we had Drama Days. We used dialogues and playlets from Peg Kehret’s Acting Natural. Dramas helped students to recognize authorial tone and expression in dialogue. We also were able to look more closely at how character interactions reveal conflict, which lead to discussions of theme. While we did not do free choice reading on Fridays, the Friday read alouds offered an opportunity for community, story-telling, and noticing features of stories that impact readers.

One Student’s Portfolio of the “9” Weeks of Free Choice Reading

Here is a link to Maddie’s Slide Show, with her (and her mom’s) permission. What you can see here is this student tracking her own progress as a reader. If we are going to create an experience where students choose their own books, then it made sense to me to also encourage students to track their own reading progress. I modeled how I use sticky notes to note characters, setting, conflicts, and passages that resonate with me. I offered the Google form as a way of tracking their books and responses. I actually use Goodreads, but a Google form can mimic that in some ways.

I did not give grades until the ninth week of the quarter when students submitted their learning portfolios. The portfolio included a screencast discussion of the reading choices and then a slide show of reflections related to comparing text structure, language lessons, and read alouds.

Here is Maddie’s screencast and evidence of close reading. She included a screenshot of the form she used to track her reading progress:

Here is Maddie’s comparison of the text structure of her biographical sketch (partner story) and drama — both, she read aloud at our Friday read-aloud.

As I mentioned above, we did language lessons twice a week to practice close reading and to consider word in context. We always talked about how the “right” word can help us name experiences for ourselves and others. We also extended our language discussions to apply to the characters we were getting to know in our reading.

The read alouds of the biographies were primarily for us to learn about one another and to feel the power and privilege of authoring another person’s story. However, we also learned how to read FOR others.  Maddie reflects on her read aloud experience here.

While some students were finishing books on their own for the first time in years, other students were rekindling their love of reading, a love that was lost as books were picked apart in the name of rigor or reading for pleasure became synonymous with timers, logs, and parent signatures.

Maddie’s mom noticed the rekindling for her daughter and appreciated the screencast as one way of witnessing her daughters reading experiences at school:

I’ve seen Maddie’s screencast and in some ways it reminded me of the book projects she would do on a bi-monthly basis since 3rd grade. However, the quarterly screencast was more comprehensive, as it covered many books rather than one or two. And, because she implemented her recorded voice to the screencast, I was able to hear her explain her work which was something I always missed out on when she presented her book report to the class.I liked how the screencast was organized. I liked the section for making connections from the student’s personal feelings or experiences to the characters or scenes in the books.

For the Next Nine Weeks

I know the human beings in my six classes as readers at week ten of the school year better than I have in the past thirteen years of teaching. I know who is confident, who is not; who is a fake-reader, who is perhaps too careful; who loves to swim in drama, who likes to keep it real. I learned how to teach as a fellow-reader, and now that we are moving into a whole-class/book group unit, I am feeling out of sorts.  I am changed as a teacher.

The purpose of reading a shared text is no longer to teach my way of reading or my expectations. The purpose is to create a space where each reader can bring his/her experience (lived and read) to the shared experience. The questions, then, for our second quarter include: What does it mean to read as a community? What does it mean to share a reading experience? How does a reading community experience shape our understanding of a text?